It is a well known fact the technological landscape today is extremely diverse and evolving at incredible rates. Technologies new and old, simple and complex are being developed at a rate that makes it difficult for a business to keep track, and from the standpoint of industry leaders that rely on the cutting-edge, an efficient management system geared towards minimizing this difficulty is a practical necessity.
There are of course known databases available, including the popular public resources of Google™, Wikipedia™ and numerous other searching resources. One additional private resource is known as the Engineering Village™, which is a collection of several research databases covering a wide variety of research reports, trade journals and conference proceedings. The information included in all these resources, though vast, is unfortunately disorganized, one dimensional and in many cases repetitive.
Although most, if not all, of the these searching resources have advanced searching capability that allows users to search over a wide variety of search terms, all such searching capabilities are textually-based. Thus, while it may be possible to narrow search results by including or excluding certain terms, there is no possibility to search for concrete relationships with other potentially relevant technologies. In that sense, the currently available searching resources are, at most, information resources, and not knowledge resources.